Ive been looking into the necesities of home making a headphone measurement rig. Its a bit complicated once your talking ear size, shape, clamp, materials and so on.
It occurs to me that headphones.com stands as the leading educator on this topic, and is even actively adjusting the typical orientation or view of how we read these graphs. I feel like headphones.com should grassroots a measurement kit on their site, and offer compensations for the big boy rigs they use. Would just be nice to be able to do this from home, and if a proper compensation scheme could be worked up to match the other stuff, suddenly we can all make and coorborate measurements. Im sure it will start a bit messy, but the more people who measure and share, the more likely standardized fitment and measurement practices can be addressed. Just a thought as i feel this would be HUGE to the community. Measurementa are useful, but only to a point without being able to reference ones own gear.
That would be very cool, but a lot of work since every headphone would need its own compensation. Still, Resolve is already measuring headphones on multiple rigs. What’s one more?
Unfortunately the challenge is just that measurement rigs are expensive.
There are some clone options available of things like GRAS rigs, but given the fact that the IP infringement is a factor it’s not something that we would be able to actively recommend and certainly not something we could sell.
Additionally it’s worth noting that many of the clone options do not exactly match the real rigs so that’s another issue even if you do get one.
It would be awesome if measurement rigs were much more affordable, and part of me hopes that with the potential demand amongst the audio community there may be an opportunity for B&K or GRAS to release something at a much more attainable price. But until then we are a little stuck with how things are.
(One of the main reasons they’re so expensive is because there’s a lot of money that goes into developing them, but then not a huge customer base. So whilst the cost to build a 5128 etc isn’t all that much, they have to amortize very high development costs over a small number of sales. If they were to sell them cheaper there is now a market of audio enthusiasts for these products that didn’t exist even a few years ago, but it’d be a huge risk for either company to take.)
